


Taking What We Want, Before They Teach Us Differently

by Bibliotecaria_D



Series: Footnotes [4]
Category: Transformers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:32:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliotecaria_D/pseuds/Bibliotecaria_D
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Fireflight/Vortex: These rotors are </i>mine<i> now. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Taking What We Want, Before They Teach Us Differently

_Fireflight/Vortex: These rotors are_ mine _now._

[* * * * *]

 **Title:** Taking What We Want, Before They Teach Us Differently  
 **Warning:** The brutal self-interest of children, in adult bodies.  
 **Rating:** R  
 **Continuity:** G1  
 **Characters:** Vortex, Fireflight  
 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn’t own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.  
 **Motivation (Prompt):** _Fireflight/Vortex: These rotors are_ mine _now._

[* * * * *]

The Aerialbots were young. Too young for any battlefield, really, but specifically for Earth. The young and inexperienced mechs in both factions were long dead, and only the best fighters had survived to reach Earth. On this planet, far from training and teachers and gentle air, the Aerialbots were thrown up into blue skies to fight the day they were created. Earth the battlefield, where veterans reigned the skies and they hadn’t the experience to pick a profile to match a face flashing over raised guns and flying fists. They managed to live through their first day, then the next battle, and the days of war after that. They aged, despite the odds1.

They fought and lived with the fierce brutality of the very young, however, and Prime’s group of stupendously idiotic Autobots didn’t know enough to not mistake youthful enthusiasm for a lack of grounding.

Vortex knew better. He’d picked enough mechs — Decepticons or Autobots, it didn’t matter — apart at the welds to know that the younger a mech was, the less maturity wore the sharp edges off living. Experience let a mech be a monster. The demons of Cybertron were monsters because they knew better and chose to continue. Certain Decepticons had become monsters long ago; demons in the ranks that even other casual criminals avoided. Vortex made the decision each and every time to continue wrecking lives, closing his hands around his victims’ necks with the conscious thought that he never made the so-called _right_ choice.

The very young didn’t have that background knowledge running through their minds. Oh, certainly the Autobots had tried to install the subsets, preprogram the morals, but that was hand-feeding information to a toddler. The Aerialbots had probably responded to the preached monologues with wide, glazed optics and restless boredom. Information wasn’t the same as knowledge, and knowledge had to be earned. Choices had to be _made_ , not dictated from afar.

Eventually, the Aerialbots would learn through observation and experience the grounding that fully mature mechs had for their ethical systems. They’d made a large step in that by actually deciding to stick with the Autobots that one time2. It’d been a blunder from the Decepticon jets that Vortex had raged about later, once the potential for some truly manipulatively delicate handling of the situation had passed. If only he’d been allowed at the Aerialbots’ tender minds, to shift the pieces into a puzzle that they’d unlock at his direction…

He was a monster, and he knew how to create monsters as well. The very young had something that not even he could twist further, however. They had the sheer, inexperienced ingenuousness of those who simply did not know better — or better yet, didn’t know to care.

They flew and fought with the selfish, hateful, avalanche of rage and glee that children with tantrums possessed, throwing their weight against whatever got in their way. They didn’t care about consequences. They didn’t care about _others_. Vortex suspected they managed to pass themselves off as not totally self-centered to the other Autobots only through the imposed gestalt link. It was more difficult to see a truly selfish mech when the selfishness was spread over more than one mech. The Autobots had no idea what they had in their ranks, contemptuously watching like xenophobic aliens at a galactic zoo.

The Aerialbots hadn’t had _time_ to knit together the bonds that social networks required. There were no internal surfaces to catch the barbed hooks of regret and doubt. Anything that might go against their self-assured confidence flew past their minds, having nothing to grip and hold onto. There was only the smooth, slick, hollow-but-absolute certainty of the young and very, very sure of themselves. They hadn’t, after all, learnt any better.

It bent Vortex’s libido over a chair and ravished him every time he saw even a hint of it on the battlefield. A real display of it left his knee joints a little weak and had him pawing Brawl’s treads and wibbling for attention afterward.

The odd thing was that Vortex found them, as a whole, unattractive. The Aerialbots were built strangely, as if the Autobot engineers had taken apart a human-designed jet and clumsily filled in the root mode to fit. There was no indication that their alternate mode acted as armor and disguise instead of a shell. There was no uniformity among their forms, or even their personalities. The Decepticon jets had been utterly repulsed; the combiner teams had been more discretely appalled. At least the Stunticons had been designed with more roles than _Become a gestalt. No, seriously, that’s your only lot in life. Whatever could you mean, range of function?_

But leaving them at loose ends had certainly added to the dissociative fugue as the Aerialbots’ raw minds made connections and fixated. The results, Vortex decided, could have been better. They could have easily fit into the Decepticon ranks with some prodding. Vortex could have caught one or more of them for his own taste of adventure. It could have been better.

However, getting flattened by the crunch of impact, rotors stomped into the dirt by hot thrusters, pain uncaringly caused without a sign of hesitation? Never better. No one had apparently informed the Aerialbots of such things as _forbidden pleasures._ Or rather, the prissy Autobots had probably filed that under one of their strict, stupid rules, and like slag was Vortex going to let that bit of information turn into learned knowledge. He had his own lessons to teach, and they were the kind that were likely illegal under Prime’s ethical system, fun as flying through a tornado, and would leave him crawling back to Combaticon HQ whimpering with pain and pleasure the whole way.

The best part would be the crawling, because that was going to take half of forever and allow him to play this encounter on repeat the entire time. His legs were already beyond supporting his weight, so the crawling would be literal. It was going to be glorious. Fireflight bent two of his rotors against the burning feet braced on them, and Vortex _screamed_ as they reached the vibrating tension point where metal flexibility maxed out. A little more, a tiny bit more, and—

Vortex gasped, clawing helplessly at the ground as sensors strobed through their highest settings into the trembling realm where they weren’t sure if they were registering agony or intense pleasure. They shrieked warnings in his relay centers either way. The barest turn of the Aerialbot’s wrist would crack the rotors their entire length like a bundle of sticks held together only by his rotor mount, and he was torn between suggesting it or just hoping the slagging jet would twitch the pressure high enough to snap them in half. He was already praying the ‘bot would get more inventive on the remaining two rotors. Young mechs had the ball bearings to experiment with things older mechs had lost the imagination for.

Fireflight stopped right at the limit, the slightest tint of mature thought in the childlike glitter in his innocent blue optics. Like a human child wondering if it were wrong to pluck the wings off a honeybee, even though the bee stung and he wanted a chance to stroke the fuzz on its back without it flying away.

“Don’t—stop n-n **ow** ,” Vortex ground out, half pleading and half demanding. This honeybee really, really wanted his wings plucked and back stroked. He didn’t know what he could do to _make_ Fireflight continue.

This Aerialbot had always been the flighty one. He’d never been able to pinpoint if Fireflight was absent-minded or abstractly brilliant in the same way Skywarp occasionally betrayed. That kind of genius might have already figured everything out, which was scary. To take Vortex right to the precipice and abandon him there would bring him to begging quicker than outright torture. Frag, he’d happily grovel, right here on his belly, if that’s what it’d take for the jet to finish this. That’d be really smart of the Autobot, and…actually really hot, now that he thought it.

Hotter yet, however, was the youthful, pitilessly hard light restored to Fireflight’s optics when Vortex managed to twist enough to get his visor out of the dirt. Not a monster, not a conscious beast deciding right or wrong, but a young mech who simply took his joy when and how he found it. Vortex stared and squirmed and squealed as the slow, slow twist started on just one of the warped rotors and — oh, oh yes, _oh_ , ah, a~ah — the thruster against the other whined online and began to _melt_ the stressed metal.

 _*Take me to the slagheap, Primus, I’ve died and gone to the smelter!*_

“These rotors,” sweet and light, as possessive as a child with a new toy, Fireflight smiled brightly, “are **mine** now.”

 

[* * * * *]  
 **Footnotes**  
[* * * * *]

 

1Swindle took the bets, of course, and the odds had been heavily--but not surprisingly-- _not_ in their favor. The Autobots thought that the Decepticons regarded the Aerialbots half-humorously, half-warily, like adult humans from a military unit watching a preschool class play with automatic weaponry. Instead, what had struck Swindle was the strange sense of pity the Decepticons placing the wagers all seemed to share. Rookie Decepticons like the Stunticons weren’t mistaken for or (stupidly) treated as mature mechs, and the Decepticon faction as a whole couldn’t fathom how the Aerialbots got through the times between battles, much less the battles themselves. Autobots, they agreed with the odd bemusement of spectators watching a henhouse adopt a nest of baby chickenhawks, hadn’t a clue how to deal with newbies.

2The betting had been fast and furious that day, changing by the hour. Condescending pity for the ignorant Aerialbots had changed to incredulous scoffing. Siding with the _Autobots?_ It really had been like seeing chickenhawks choose to start clucking and pecking at the dirt with the hens.


End file.
